In a Series on American Climate Politics by Guest Blogger Craig
K. Comstock, this Post asks what we can learn from what it took to
end the Cold War about what it will take to limit Global Warming.
This essay first appeared at The Huffington Post on 22 August 2013
as “What we can learn from the end of the Cold War.” Comstock says
of this Series for Caixin:

"Even more than economic growth, climate change is the defining
issue of our century, yet the American political system has so far
addressed it only timidly and obliquely. One question is why.
Another question is how the system can be prodded to deal with a
threat whose cause is invisible (greenhouse gases), and comes as a
"side effect" of benefits from burning fossil fuels.”

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131012

AMERICAN CLIMATE POLITICS: SCARING ELITES INTO AVOIDING
DISASTER

Guest Blogger Craig K. Comstock

Has a big factor been ignored in analyzing the end of the Cold
War in the 1980s, and if so, what's a lesson for today? As part of
the explanation for a radical change of policy, did Gorbachev and
his circle fear that the system of "mutual assured destruction"
(MAD) was unstable and thus fatally dangerous to the USSR and
beyond it, to the humanity that he kept invoking?

Recently revealed (and largely ignored) documents suggest that a
particular episode of near-nuclear war in 1983 may have shocked a
progressive sector of the Soviet leadership. If so, the needs of
the MAD system guaranteed that this fear would never be spoken and
has remained largely unconscious.

Reagan enthusiasts insisted the Cold War died because the
president denounced the USSR as an "evil empire" (in March 1983)
and spent that country into the ground militarily. Other factors
were the (Soviet) failure in Afghanistan (leading to a withdrawal
starting in July 1985), and the nuclear power accident at Chernobyl
(in April 1986).

Even if all of these factors played a role, the end may have
been initiated by an event dismissively known to policy-makers as a
"war scare" in November 1983. It's called a "scare" as if it were a
cavalry charge, but actually it was the near-destruction of the
northern hemisphere, which would have been not really a war, but a
massacre unprecedented by many orders of magnitude.

What happened in late 1983 was that the Soviets calculated that
the U.S. was about to launch a surprise nuclear attack, using as
cover a military "game" called "Able Archer." The script of this
exercise included a nuclear attack on the USSR. What better
disguise for a real surprise attack, thought Yuri Andropov, who was
then leader of the USSR, than a NATO game simulating such an
attack?

We know about this event, 30 years later, because of Freedom of
Information requests by the invaluable National Security Archive at
George Washington University in Washington. Relevant documents are
now available in three parts put on line by the archive (which I'm
sure now wishes it had a different acronym, perhaps justifiably
expanding the first word of its name to "International").

These documents have attracted much less journalistic attention
than the whereabouts of Edward Snowden, but they reveal in some
detail an event that would have wrecked our civilization and that
may have helped lead to one of the biggest political reversals of
the past half century.

Participants in the standing nuclear threat have reason to deny
that the system was unstable, because success in that system, which
exists at a lower level to this day, demands an apparent
willingness to participate in the wrecking of the northern
hemisphere if the other side seems about to attack. Both sides
reserved the right to "launch on warning" because obviously it was
advantageous to launch missiles before some of them were destroyed
by "absorbing" an attack.

Let's look at the situation faced by the national leader of a
"super power." While intercontinental missiles would take up to a
half hour to arrive, missiles launched by a submarine or
"intermediate range" missiles in Western Europe would take around
eight minutes to "decapitate" the political leadership of either
country. In that eight minutes, a leader would have to verify an
attack spotted by complex instruments and reported by computers,
consult advisers, get to a shelter, make a decision, and act.

To the best of our knowledge, Soviet leaders in November 1983
thought that a U.S. nuclear attack was imminent and were wondering
at what point to preempt it. In actuality the U.S. had no such
intentions, but the Soviet leadership secretly concluded that it
might be perceiving many indicators of such an attack. Was this a
stable system? In the Cuban missile crisis of 20 years earlier, at
least both sides were openly involved and, whatever the degree of
danger, were communicating and could alleviate the situation.

In 1986, without any knowledge of what had happened in November
1983, I had occasion to ask a high official of the Reagan
administration if the U.S. would be willing to help improve the
Soviet system for detecting a nuclear attack, so as to eliminate
false alarms. He replied that the technology transfer could be used
for military purposes.

During the Cuban missile crisis in 1963 the U.S could not be
seen to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey under pressure, even
though even though the missiles were obsolete and would have been
withdrawn anyway. (JFK secretly agreed to do so as part of the
agreement ending the crisis.) In the same way, the USSR could not,
in the mid 1980s, easily withdraw from a system of mutual nuclear
threats that had shown its instability on several occasions. (The
Cuban missile crisis of 1963 and the Able Archer crisis or "war
scare" of 1983 are only the most publicly documented.)

Leaders on both sides were locked into a system that didn't
allow them to change lest they appear "weak." For whatever complex
of reasons, and with whatever intentions, it was Mikhail Gorbachev
who utterly changed the system. He pronounced other reasons, such
as the asserting the right of each people to chose its own
government without being pressured by an imperial power, and
putting the welfare of humankind ahead of a revolutionary economic
ideology.

One result of this approach was that the U.S. "won" the Cold
War. Another was that the destruction of the northern hemisphere in
a nuclear exchange became much less probable. I am not arguing that
Gorbachev intended this result, rather than reform of his own
country. In retrospect, one could argue that any responsible and
imaginative elite would take risks to avoid a nuclear exchange. The
fact that a nuclear exchange hasn't happened could lead us to feel
the policy was a success. But what was the risk?

Today we face a danger no smaller than a nuclear exchange in the
form of greenhouse gases that help produce climate change. The
threat is different in particulars. Instead of being cloaked in
secrecy, it is obvious to anyone alert to peer-reviewed science.
Instead of being explosive in nature, climate change is manifesting
only over the long term. Instead of offering no benefit other than
terrifying the other side, the threat today arises because of the
enormous benefits of fossil fuels.

But both threats, however severe, are invisible to most of us.
Some military people had to deal with nuclear system, and some
scientists are well acquainted now with the probable consequences
of climate change. Yet most of us go through life not very aware of
things we don't see and in any case don't imagine an alternative
to.

In order to escape the worst effects of climate change, the
world would have to make as fundamental a change as Gorbachev
initiated, on a scale involving fundamental existing ideologies and
arrangements. Whether this will occur we don't yet know. If it
does, the change would involve "our side," not only a Cold War
enemy.

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GUEST BLOGGER

"Craig K. Comstock studied political science at MIT and
Stanford, but makes his living as a coach to authors of books and,
for a while, as director of the Ark Foundation. Author of several
books, he also writes extensively on the internet and hosts a TV
interview show."

Winckler is selecting these Posts on American Climate Politics
from among Comstock’s many essays at the online Huffington Post.
Insightfully, Comstock often notes analogies between the politics
of climate and the politics of other global crises, present and
past.

总访问量：博主简介

韦爱德Edwin A. Winckler (韦爱德) is an American political scientist (Harvard BA, MA, and PhD) who has taught mostly in the sociology departments at Columbia and Harvard. He has been researching China for a half century, publishing books about Taiwan’s political economy (Sharpe, 1988), China’s post-Mao reforms (Rienner, 1999), and China’s population policy (Stanford, 2005, with Susan Greenhalgh). Recently he has begun also explaining American politics to Chinese. So the purpose of this Blog is to call attention to the best American media commentary on current American politics and to relate that to the best recent American academic scholarship on American politics. Winckler’s long-term institutional base remains the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York City. However he and his research have now retreated to picturesque rural Central New York.